For a nation of buttes: the glory of federalism.

WE pulled into Butte, Montana, for lunch.

We're far enough along in our story for a brief aside: One of the great advantages to working from home is that you don't have to stay there. So, almost every summer my wife (who also works from home), our daughter, and our dog (a telecommuter of sorts himself) hit the road. It's a wonderful opportunity to spend time with your family and see the "flyover country" we pundits rarely visit save in our rhetoric. Moreover, if you drive cross-country you get to begin articles with sentences such as "We pulled into Butte, Montana, for lunch" (and then you get to write off lunch as a business expense).

Strangers in a strange land, we aimed for the historic downtown area and pulled over on Main Street, in front of an old building being renovated. On the front steps, a half-dozen construction workers were having lunch. As the Goldbergs decamped from the car, we struck up a conversation. "You drive all the way from Washington, D.C.?" one of them asked, spying our license plate.

"Yep," I answered.

"You drive all the way out here for Evel Knievel Days?" he asked.

"Uhh," I responded.

"Evel Knievel Days," I soon learned, is the storied annual festival in Butte (Knievel's birthplace) at which all things Knievel are celebrated. As we sought out guidance on where to dine--Pork Chop John's turned out to be a nice tip--the welcoming committee's leader proclaimed, "Butte's a great place! It's the only town in the whole country where there's no open-container law. You can drink a beer right out of the can in the open."

My first reaction: That is so cool.

But then the conservative ideologue's adrenaline kicked in. Oh, what a sorry state America is in! We've become so saturated with homogenizing political correctness that only poor little Butte can manage to keep a naked beer can above the floodwaters of the PC tide. Butte was once a famous mining boomtown, where any vice imaginable could be purchased in its historic red-light district. Now the men of Butte--and these were the manliest of men--nurtured the flame of free-spiritedness in the humble fact that they could drink a Bud without the Orwellian shroud of a brown paper bag.

I thought back to Tocqueville: "It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones.... Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately.... It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will."

Today, we're surrendering countless small, joyful liberties while obsessively worshipping a few large and mostly abstract ones. The typical citizen can burn the flag on his front lawn, but if he burns a pile of leaves the sheriff will pay him a visit. He can erect an altar to Mephistopheles in his driveway, but neither ol' Screwtape nor the ACLU can spare him from the righteous retribution of Leviathan's goons if he fails to sort his paper from his plastic.

As we walked back from Pork Chop John's, I surveyed the un-PC booths of Evel Knievel Days--the Smokeless Tobacco tent was particularly well-attended--and grew ever more enamored with my laborer compadres. Upon seeing them again, I thought of saying something like: "You happy few! Hold high your naked cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, a symbol, like Lady Liberty's lantern, that the flame of freedom will never fully fade!" (Instead, we merely thanked them for the lunch advice and expressed our regret that we couldn't see the big motorcycle jump later that evening.)

As Butte faded in our rearview mirror, the soporific effects of my pork-chop sandwich kicked in, and so did the countering insulin of the conservative temperament. Is it really so terrible that some cities choose to enforce their open-container laws? Am I not a fan of Rudy Giuliani's New York, where he crushed the squeegee men and porn peddlers in the name of improving the quality of life? Indeed, don't I endorse locally enforced censorship? Given my druthers, wouldn't states and local communities be empowered to "enslave men," to use Tocqueville's colorful language, in many of the "minor details" of life?

And, with a heavy heart, my answer to all these questions was: Yes.

And herein lies the creative tension, or internal contradiction, or just plain hypocrisy, of both conservatism and "liberalism." Both camps pretend to be champions of liberty and promoters of security, but we qualify the liberty and security we have in mind differently. This, in a nutshell, is the essence of the culture war. Both sides seek to "impose morality" and "expand freedom," but we have different things in mind. Conservatives value economic liberty and moral security, while the liberal values economic security and moral liberty.

Conservatives--including yours truly--can sometimes get distracted by liberals' protestations that all they want to do is "the right thing" in this or that instance: No great ideological visions here, folks, move along. But the simple fact is that progressivism is more than a political program. It has its own--often severe--code of conduct and manners, usually called "political correctness." It has sumptuary laws delineating what you can eat, drive, and wear. Paul Tillich, the liberal theologian, defined religion as that system which addresses or satisfies man's "ultimate concerns"--and thus liberalism is indistinguishable from religion, politically speaking.

But so what? America has always been a cornucopia of religious and cultural minorities--and majorities--with rules about how to live and love and even how to vote. Baptists, Anabaptists, Leninists, Shakers, Quakers, Jews: The list goes on and on. Some of these groups wanted to impose their vision on everybody. And some, like the Shakers, were content to make lovely furniture instead of babies.

The Founding Fathers had a solution to this challenge: federalism. By leaving questions of how people should live up to localities, they ensured that the people themselves would sort these questions out. Some communities would choose to define liberty very narrowly, others would embrace cosmopolitanism or even debauchery. The great failure of the Founding was that such a system countenanced slavery and, later, Jim Crow. Liberals have used this fact ever since to throw the baby of federalism out with the bathwater of state-sanctioned bigotry. Despite its moral power, this is an argument more of convenience than of conviction, since liberals rarely object to local progressive "experimentation." Indeed, Louis Brandeis's "laboratories of democracy" idea wasn't really about federalism, so much as using the states the way Douglas MacArthur used "island hopping" in World War II: as a strategy for total victory. Brandeis wanted to use the states as incubators to leapfrog toward a national administrative state.

Instead, the states should be seen as democratic bulwarks against national democracy, mini-ecosystems within the larger one. In a nationalized democracy the majorities on the coasts get to decide how the minorities in the middle should live. In a federal system, local majorities get to decide democratically how to organize their lives. If you don't like how they do things in Colorado Springs or San Francisco, you have two options: fight to change things through the political process, or move someplace where more people share your values.

This grand compromise actually maximizes happiness insofar as it ensures more people get to live according to their worldviews. Beyond the few big things found in the Constitution and the relevant bits of the Ten Commandments it is simply impossible for the government in Washington to divine how every community should be structured. A progressive vegetarian community may want to ban the slaughtering of animals. Another community--say, Orthodox Jews--might view slaughtering animals as a sacred rite. At a recent rally for Ron Paul, according to blogger Garance Franke-Ruta, an activist explained that one woman joined the "freedom movement" because of a proposed law that would have banned her pet monkey: "She came to realize that freedom is more than just a pet monkey."

Well, is it? For some people owning a monkey might be the very definition of freedom. For others, it's a pointless public-health hazard. Either way, that a presidential campaign has become the venue for proselytizers of monkey freedom should tell you a lot about the mess we've made of the constitutional order. There is no correct answer, discernible through reason or revelation, about whether people should be free to own pet monkeys or to drink beer outside without a brown paper bag. It depends on where you live and how you and your neighbors want to live. The beauty of federalism is that it values real diversity over the superficial diversities of skin color and gender. And it makes driving across the country much more interesting.